The state of the community

[zahlman]

Oh hay guys, been meaning to log back in and say stuff for quite a while now... wasn't expecting to see a thread like this, but it's just the motivation I need, I think.

Let me just toss my hat in the ring:

this is more than just a "personal problem" if more than one artist in this thread has affirmed that monetary rewards on their own are insufficient.

The sense I'm getting is more that monetary compensation, to an extent that'd be sufficient on its own, is unrealistic for the people seeking help.

That goes for more than just sprites, too. It's just a non-starter. Without going into details, I've been paid several times minimum wage for real-life programming stuff and thought it was substandard pay. Not that I minded, but the point is that I feel the work I've done, or Cam's or Hex's or NL's or Blazer's, is worth at least that much. Similarly for the talented spriters, writers, map designers, etc. in our community.

Would I do the work for less? Hell yes, obviously. I worked on FEditor for free, after all. We all do this because it's what we enjoy doing; we are amateurs in the most literal sense. But this leads us to forget for a moment what our time is worth. Add to this the demographics of the people looking for help, and you get some hilariously distorted ideas about fair rates of compensation. I vaguely remember somebody PMing me once offering to pay me to help with something I wasn't particularly interested in. I thought something like "I'm going to lowball the everloving fuck out of this because it's still a FE hack after all, but he's still not going to like what he hears and this isn't going to work out". And that's exactly what happened.

But I mean if some of the major hacks in this community were done "professionally", I imagine that a lot of those budgets would run six figures. And that's not assuming that the quality would be any better, either. Think about how many hours you log per day on these things, and how long some of these projects have been running, and how many people are on the team. It adds up. And everything always takes like at least three times as long as it seems like it "ought to" take (I'm sure the other ASM hacker types can back me up on this).

In response to the first post, though, a lot of elitism may have spilled over from past communities that don't exist anymore. FEU, for example, had loads of hacking resources all laid out in plain sight ready to be digested. People ignored them and made unnecessary posts about things they already had shoved in their faces. The responses to them were appropriately malignant. People made habits of this.

SF needs better resources. Give people what they need and they will make do with it. After all - if all you have to offer is being an ass to them, they can just ignore you...at least, if they have what they need despite.

Pretty much this. This may even have been more of a social problem with FEU than others. That said, we don't simply need better resources here; we need them to be better organized, continually. Asking people to use the search function is just not going to cut it. The new tagging feature would help, but only if someone goes back and tags all the old threads.

We also need to keep working on tools and not rest on those laurels. I saw a lot of discussion (not going to quote it) ITT about how things are easier for hackers now than they were when the "veterans" (dating back perhaps as far as 2008, omg!) started out. I say that the flip side of this is that things are not yet easy enough. It's embarrassing how long that FE6 thing went unfixed in FEditor, yes, and there are probably other bugs in it (most of which are probably my fault). But even beyond that, the whole design of the thing is just wrong in some ways. I'd start over, except that I've already committed to picking up NM3 again and doing some other tools to make it actually useful.

Yeah, I know I've been talking about NM3 for years and hardly accomplished much, but I've come to realize what the priorities are for that project, and I'm in a place in my life at the moment now where I think I can start on it again. The first order of business is to make it actually insert stuff into ROMs instead of just extracting it. This is a wheel that gets reinvented in practically every editing tool and it's time we had something standardized that can take care of that drudge work. Not to mention the value of being able to share content dumps that can just be inserted. My first planned proof-of-concept for this is to replace ZSE; all that's really needed is something that converts .mid files into content dumps in the standard format, and an NM3 module that describes the GBA native song data format - NM3 will handle the rest.